AMD Releases Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 Driver

Following the release of its new Radeon R9-290X graphics card (see our review here), AMD has posted its new Catalyst 13.11 Beta6 driver. The driver is still in the Beta phase, but using the new hardware is required. Of course, it still carries support for the older hardware as well.

The biggest highlight of the driver is the added support for the new Radeon R9 290X graphics card. It also brings support for the R9 290, though that card has yet to be released. In addition, AMD has also added automatic EyeFinity configuration as well as automatic plug and play configuration for UltraHD/4K tiled displays.

As always, the driver also comes with a roundup of performance improvements which are listed below:

Mouse cursor corruption still there? Check.Still creating random profile files that don’t work? Check.Main display still black after waking up from power saver? Check.Windows still get all messed up if you turn off displays or turn one on? Check.Maybe someday.

Nvidias current driver that came out today still supports back to the Geforce 8 series like the 8800 gt that was released in 2006. So if you want 7+ years of driver updates then it looks like the green team is the better bet.

They still release drivers for a lot of older cards, they just don't update them as often. WHQL quarterly type releases. People freak out because every new beta driver doesn't support them. Realistically, aside from profile tweaks, there isn't much they can do for the older cards at this point. The part of the drivers that handles the older cards is as good as it is going to get, they spent years optimizing it for those chips. If you want something faster, buy something newer.

I wouldn't put too much support in seeing a driver for the older HD4XXX cards even though they said they were going to do quarterly support. The AMD drivers are unified to a degree but they gave users a message for older cards with downloading 13.9 saying they have been optimized to their maximum potential from a performance and feature perspective, in short that means buy a new card. Nvidia does a larger unified driver but I'm sure the older cards are not seeing much benefit from the newer drivers since they are more geared toward newer cards

Mouse cursor corruption still there? Check.Still creating random profile files that don’t work? Check.Main display still black after waking up from power saver? Check.Windows still get all messed up if you turn off displays or turn one on? Check.Maybe someday.

Thx for the information.

Last driver corrupted my system pretty bad: After power save ticked in I couldn't get an image at all (screen stayed black). In the last few driver versions the PC would just restart if that was the case. This time I had to manually restart, with the result that my system froze within seconds in windows everytime I restarted.

In safe-mode I couldn't remove the AMD driver (because gfx-drivers don't load in safe mode, meaning CCC just closed itself as it found no hardware). Luckily I have an onboard gfx-card which I had to enable to boot the PC in normal windows and then remove the AMD driver.

After 1 hour of restarting and system freezes I will never try out an AMD beta-driver again.

I have an annoying soundbug that makes it impossible to play games with sound (extremely loud static noise) which is just a dirver problem as it went away a few times after the driver crashed and restarted. This problem isn't solved for nearly 10 months now, instead the new drivers lead to 1 hour time sinks of restarting my PC... the definition of bad support.

Mouse cursor corruption still there? Check.Still creating random profile files that don’t work? Check.Main display still black after waking up from power saver? Check.Windows still get all messed up if you turn off displays or turn one on? Check.Maybe someday.

Thx for the information.

Last driver corrupted my system pretty bad: After power save ticked in I couldn't get an image at all (screen stayed black). In the last few driver versions the PC would just restart if that was the case. This time I had to manually restart, with the result that my system froze within seconds in windows everytime I restarted.

In safe-mode I couldn't remove the AMD driver (because gfx-drivers don't load in safe mode, meaning CCC just closed itself as it found no hardware). Luckily I have an onboard gfx-card which I had to enable to boot the PC in normal windows and then remove the AMD driver.

After 1 hour of restarting and system freezes I will never try out an AMD beta-driver again.

I have an annoying soundbug that makes it impossible to play games with sound (extremely loud static noise) which is just a dirver problem as it went away a few times after the driver crashed and restarted. This problem isn't solved for nearly 10 months now, instead the new drivers lead to 1 hour time sinks of restarting my PC... the definition of bad support.

This is my first and last AMD gfx-card.

Wow all this while using a BETA driver? Who knew? Also this post should be sent to AMD since it is a driver that is still work in progress. Talking about driver bugs everywhere else other than to AMD doesn't help to fix jack.

Nvidias current driver that came out today still supports back to the Geforce 8 series like the 8800 gt that was released in 2006. So if you want 7+ years of driver updates then it looks like the green team is the better bet.

Yet even though the driver supports the 8000 series NVidia GPUs, it does not mean any of the fixes or optimizations are for that series GPUs. AMD used to do it to but when the GPUs don't see any major benefit, what's the point?

I've also been noticing black screen issues when returning to my PC after leaving it on for a long time (aka eating dinner then returning) and this was with 13.4 stable. I upgraded to 13.11 beta 6 in the hope that this issue would go away, but judging by the comments, it has not.

I've also got another annoying issue with any version newer than 13.4 stable. I'm using Classic Shell on Windows 8.0 and Honeyview image viewer. Opening my list of recently viewed documents on the start menu is MUCH slower than with the 13.4 stable driver. I sure hope this issue will be fixed by next stable release.

An update from my last comment. Good news, my computer has been on for the last 24 hours (I usually switch it off during the day and night and only have it on for a few hours in the evening) and it hasn't black screened once. Just got home from work and the screen went on without a hitch. Looks like I'll be sticking with 13.11 beta 6 for a while, despite the sluggish issues with Classic Start's recent documents (this only happens when an image is open in Honeyview) I may have to try another image viewer sometime.